Which System Center Version?

[Cache]

I've been going through my budget and hopefully by April I should have something left (providing nothing blows up!) since I've been a lot stricter this year in saying no after I overspent last year.

 

One of the things I'm considering if I do is purchasing System Center for management of the workstations, mainly for deployment of things like office which seems to be a lot easier using System Center then Group Policy.

 

So two questions:

 

1. Is it worth considering/getting System Center?

1. If so, which version should I be looking at? Configuration Manager, Essentials or some other version?

 

Currently have approx 250 machines and 5 servers.

[fawkers]

This all depends on what you are looking for, if your after a solution which takes into account updates, software deployment, OS deployment, etc then you need to look at system center (Config manager if your after the full works). If however your looking just for a better way to deploy software you may wish to consider Software Management, Deployment & Distribution | Specops Deploy It's an add in that puts extra functionality into group policy to allow software deployment and removal based on user defined targets (can be OU's but does not have to be).

 

Hope this helps

[gshaw]

I would go for SCCM, it's very powerful once you get used to it

 

System Center Essentials does some monitoring as well but you lose the OS deployment functions of SCCM which I've got quite attached to from the SMS 2003 days so that's where the choice lies really. SCCM 2007 latest release is R3 SP2 at the moment...

[AngryTechnician]

For your size network I would recommend Essentials over Config Manager unless you really want the OS deployment extras that dshaw mentioned. I use Essentials and do my OS deployment with WDS, which works just fine for me and is included in Server 2008.

 

I did look at SCCM but didn't really need any of the extras and so the higher cost wasn't really worth it.

[Cache]

We can't deploy OS images at the moment as we don't have any volume licence agreement, we only use the OEM installed on the machine (bit of a pain at times, but it's ok) and I've played with WDS on my home test network so wouldn't mind using that.

 

It's all up in there, but it was the software deployment and the monitoring side of things which caught my eye and with a few more people using it I thought it was worth looking into and was just curious as to which would be recommened if people were using it .

 

All depends on me remaining protective of my remaining budget (and chopping the hands off anyone who wants any more toner!!)

 

(Edit: just realised I could try both under the technet subscription, don't know why I didn't think of that!)

Edited January 6, 2011 by Cache